


Animi Repono

by Lunar_L



Category: Original Work
Genre: Flash Fiction, Gen, Memory Loss, Sci-Fi, Second person POV, capitalism wins over innovation once again, reader POV, unisex name and no pronouns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:49:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29003253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunar_L/pseuds/Lunar_L
Summary: You've been experiencing memory blackouts lately, and to make things more confusing, you always seem to have a lot of money in your pocket when you come to. Which is lucky, because you really need that money with all the debt and the doctors you've been seeing - even if they can't seem to help.But, with the help of an investigator, your answers finally seem within reach.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	Animi Repono

**Author's Note:**

> From the Tumblr prompt:  
> "All the doctor’s have said that there is nothing wrong with you. You know it isn’t true. Over the past few months you have been experiencing huge holes in your memory, sometimes for days. So you hired a private investigator to follow you. Today is when you find out what they discovered."

It’s a run-down building, the kind where the paint on the outside is chipped away to reveal the brick beneath. The remaining white paint is yellowing around the edges with age and the only parts that look at all alive are the advertising posters taped to the inside of the grimy window serving as lighting for the store front.

You glance down at the address you’ve been given and glance up again to check the building in front of you and yes, it’s definitely the right place. This is where the private investigator, Mr Hanley, had followed you to before your mind had gone rogue with your time. Apparently, it’s here that you came and spent an hour or so before continuing on with your day as normal, before you suddenly became aware that you no longer had recollection of the past few days. This store is the only wild card.

_Thomson and Son Technology and Storage Solutions_

Taking a deep breath, you walk forward and push open the stiff door into the store. A chime goes off as you step inside and you glance around for something to do in the absence of a staff member to focus on. Dusty old laptops and circuit boards litter the small desk off to the side, the glass casing that serves as the counter containing all sorts of pieces of technology inside, some you recognise, some you don’t. Of course, you’ve never been much for keeping up with the latest gadgets, so it’s no surprise you have no idea what some of this stuff is. Still, there’s something unsettling about some of the…weirder looking components you don’t know.

Without warning, a young man appears from a door hidden behind the counter’s backdrop and smiles at you. His appearance startles you into forgetting how you were going to open this strange conversation.

“Repair? Buying or selling?” he asks.

“W-What?” you stutter, not really taking in the question at all.

“You looking for anything in particular? Or have you got old parts to sell?”

He glances down at your hands, empty except for the solitary piece of paper with the street address on it. He’s probably realising that you don’t have anything with you to sell.

“I-I was given this address,” you say, not entirely sure anymore how much to lead with, “I thought you might be able to help me. But-”

“Ah,” he says in a tone that speaks of secrets and mystery, “I see. A _special_ case.”

“I was told to come here by-” you try.

“Ah-ah, no need to give names. We can get to that later. Please come with me.”

He steps through the door at the back, holding it ajar for you to follow. That smile still rests on his face, but it doesn’t feel friendly. You wonder if you’re making a mistake by following him.

The back room doesn’t seem stranger than what you expect any other back room to look like, but it’s the door at the far side that leads to a dark corridor which has your internal danger alarm blaring. You hesitate for a moment and he notices, his smile bleeding out to distort his features further.

“If you’d rather return with someone else later, that’s fine,” he says, appearing to be reassuring in theory if not in spirit, “but I can’t promise our offer will still apply.”

“Offer?” you ask.

Offer implies there is something to gain here and you’ve just spent a lot of money you can’t really afford on a private investigator. The only reason you’d chosen to do so is because of the suspicious appearance of extra money on your person after you blacked out. There had been a little left over after you’d hastily paid off the last of the debt and covered rent for next month, and you are losing a lot of time to these mysterious absences.

“Yes, of course,” the young man says, “the offer depends entirely on yourself and the client. And many of them don’t want to commit to more than one product at a time.”

Commit? Product? _What have you been doing here?!_ None of this sounds safe or even remotely legal to your disbelieving ears.

You decide to focus on one aspect that stands out most to you. “Client?” you ask.

“Yes, if you simply follow me, we can explain. You are free to accept or decline the offer at any time.”

You bite your lip as you debate what might happen the next time your car breaks down and you still don’t have good credit to get a newer one, or even collateral to ask for another killer-interest loan.

“Okay,” you say and on you both go. You feel like you’re walking to the gallows or the guillotine.

It only takes about five minutes before the corridor curves, the darkness from earlier melting away with every light that flashes on above your head. The dark, grimy feeling of the store starts to ebb, quick to be replaced by a cold, clinical feel. The curve continues until you start to feel like you’ll turn back to the store at any minute, but finally the overhead lights illuminate a doorway.

There are two doors here and as you pass through, they swing closed again behind you. The air here smells like disinfectant and you can hear a strange electrical hum coming from your left, though it sounds way off in the distance.

“Here is our latest client,” the man tells you and you realise he is indicating an elderly couple. The man is wearing a hospital gown and is slumped over the arm of a wheelchair, staring blankly at the ground beneath him. The woman is standing tall and alert instead, staring at you with what seems to be a similar sense of terror to what you are feeling.

She glances at the man and back to you. She eyes the dark marks on your temples – the only physical sign you have that something might have happened to you during your blackouts – and takes a breath as if steeling herself for something.

“He needs the last twenty years,” she says to the young man, as if that makes sense in some way. His brow wrinkles in response, the first time he’s dropped the disconcerting smile since you first laid eyes upon him.

“At our current rate of compression, that will be the equivalent of just over three months,” he replies, “It will take most of the machine’s current processing power and a much longer period of time. That’s an expensive run. And of course, the product will need to be compensated well.”

He uses a casual hand wave to indicate that he is including you in the discussion somehow, though you’re still not following how you factor into whatever they’re talking about.

“Mr Thomson, he doesn’t even remember who I am,” the woman says, and her stray tears betray the emotion she is trying to lock behind a dam threatening to spill over disastrously.

“He used to be confused about who I was, but he always knew that he knew and loved me. Now he’s just…blank when he looks at me.

“Can I go home now?” the old man pipes up in a small voice, still staring at the ground, but at least now he sees it, instead of staring through it. “My mama gets worried when I’m late for dinner and she won’t like that I left with a stranger.”

“You see?” she shrieks, and you physically jump a little in place with the volume of it. The man cowers in his chair like the frightened child he thinks he is. “The doctors don’t think he has that long left anyway. I just-I just want him to live his last few years as my husband again!”

The young man is trying to control the situation again, and he glances at you as if you might run off like a skittish kitten. “Well ma’am, that will depend on how- Ah! Here he is now. Father!”

He has noticed what you have not. There is a man approaching the four of you and he greets the young man with clear affection as your mind is still roiling from everything you have learned in the past 10 minutes.

“Oh Sam!” the older man says happily as he spots you amongst the others, “Back again, I see. Looking to put some money aside for that new car?”

“I’ve been here before,” you say, stupidly.

“Yes, of course,” he continues, “and you say that every time.” He chuckles. As he begins to talk to you, the younger man and the old woman start to furiously discuss something, but you can’t quite hear them over the constant background humming and the sound of the man before you.

“I’m Dr Thomson. This is the fourth time Mr Hanley has led you to us. The first time you were referred it was by the trauma councillor you spoke to after…the accident. She believed we could help you move on. And we did, of course, while making sure you were also compensated enough to cover the funeral costs.”

“I-”

You stop. Funeral costs? You…You don’t remember a funeral. But…your son had died, hadn’t he? You remember that much. You must have had a funeral for him. Why don’t you remember the funeral? Why have you never realised that you don’t remember the funeral?

Everyone has always said you don’t remember the accident because it was too horrible to bear, but…you don’t know if you can trust your own mind anymore.

“You’ve been stealing my memories.”

“Steal? Goodness, no.” He looks horrified at the mere thought of such a thing. “We simply shrink them down and tag them onto a separate neural pathway. They sort of piggyback onto another memory, ready to be retrieved when it’s time to free them up. Like a compressed file on a computer; you can’t access them until you extract them.”

“Then I want them back,” you say, “Even the bad ones. Even the boring ones.”

He looks pained. Like he genuinely sympathises but is frustrated with the situation.

“I know you don’t remember your visits here, Sam, but I’ve explained before. You can’t have them back yet. There isn’t space for them.”

How can there not be space? You made these memories, didn’t you? If they’ve been added to another memory, then why can’t they be moved back again?

“Sam,” he says quickly, as if he knows what you want to say, “our clients are people whose neural pathways are breaking down. Mostly Alzheimer’s for memory and Parkinson’s for motor function. You have a special two-way neural transmitter I developed which you received at your first visit.”

You can sense what is coming, but you have no energy left to argue.

“Your pathways are being temporarily used by other people, Sam. And they paid you to let them.”

You look over at the old man, slumped in his chair, cowering from the stranger that is his loving wife. She and Thomson Jr seem to have come to some sort of understanding.

“Father,” Thomson Jr says as he approaches, “The client and I have agreed. It’s just dependant on the product.”

He turns to look at me and his smile no longer seems sinister. Now it just seems pitying and somewhat guilty.

“The client would like the equivalent of eighty-two days of your past memories. The procedure would take about eighteen hours this time. You will retain the ability to use the effected pathways for a further five hours until you lose access.”

This is your life. Narrowed down into pointless numbers. A contract for renting space in your mind. Why did you agree to this each time before? Really, you don’t know why you’re asking that. You _do_ know after all.

“How much will I get paid?”

“In addition to our fee equivalent to the work undertaken, the client will be willing to compensate you with fifty thousand.”

For someone who has been scraping by on nothing, that is an insane amount of money to be offered.

“So, Sam,” Dr Thomson says, “Do you agree to let us repress eighty-two days until such time as the client…no longer needs the pathways?”

Fifty thousand. A new car. A home deposit. A computer for the kids…kid…to do homework. There are so many different ways you could use that kind of money. And this would be the last time, wouldn’t it?

Although how many times have you thought that before?


End file.
